Balsa Research

We are in the process of evaluating the most impactful area for research and policy development. On this page, you can see examples of policies that make our shortlist.

Repealing the Jones Act

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (Jones Act) has crippled our merchant marine and domestic shipping capabilities to only narrow private benefit. Repeal even of manufacturing requirements alone would be transformative, starting with immediately switching traditional coastal trucking routes to cheaper, more eco-friendly and cost-efficient shipping routes, significantly reducing traffic and carbon emissions while lowering costs for domestically produced goods, improving American competitiveness and providing a noticeable bonus to economic capacity and growth. Benefits are so large that private losers could be made whole.

Reforming or Re-imagining NEPA

The National Environmental Policy Act has noble goals but its core principle of enforcement via lawsuits and veto points leads to continuously expanding needless requirements, costs and delays, including to green projects. What we have now is not what anyone wanted or intended. The underlying structure frustrates most attempts at incremental reform.

Moving towards a time-limited cost-benefit approach with negotiation and collaboration among real stakeholders and a robust independent analysis funded by development interests, followed by a deliberative governmental go or no-go decision, could better safeguard our environment and communities.

Rethinking Housing Policy

Our failure to build sufficient housing in places people want to live due to expanding regulatory burdens, overly restrictive zoning and local veto points (‘NIMBY’) is driving up the cost of living, preventing people from living where they can be most productive and holding our economy back. Making our most productive cities bigger and more affordable would supercharge our economy and prospects for workers. Federal efforts to address this collective action problem have been neglected due to lack of perceived opportunity, but there are more affordances available than people realize, from building codes to conditional subsidies to the rules for mortgage influence and more.

Reasonable AI Policy

AI will transform our world. Along with great promise, it also poses a real risk of human extinction. We are exploring how best to guard against catastrophic outcomes by preventing the training and deployment of dangerously capable systems until we know how to align them with human values and ensure control of the future is not lost. This requires a focus on possession, collection and usage of high end AI-focused computer chips and data centers, as the only practical way to prevent the unsafe training of dangerous systems. Done correctly this can avoid stifling our ability to enjoy the gains from innovation, and also ensure our privacy remains respected. The wrong regulations, poorly targeted, could easily either cripple the existing industry or be captured by it to protect insiders, without protecting us from extinction risks.

[This project was created by the GiveWiki team. Please visit the website of the organization for more information on their work.]